OLPC announces "Give 1 Get 1" XO

The OLPC, or One Laptop Per Child, initiative is something that all gamers and hardware enthusiasts should be interested in right now, especially if they want to buy themselves an early Christmas present.

The initiative has been going on for a while now, desperately trying to design and build cheap laptops for children in developing countries. This effort culminated in the XO-1 system, which costs just $188.

The XO-1 is built by Quanta Computers and houses a wireless LAN, 1GB of flash memory and 256 MB of DRAM, as well as a camera, microphone and Fedora-based OS. With an incredibly low price, the laptop is obviously of immediate interest to tinkerers and geeks everywhere who have, until now, been unable to get their geeky mitts on one.

According to OLPC news however, the laptop will soon be available to the general public - albeit on one condition.

As part of a "Give 1 Get 1" holiday promotion, the laptops will go on sale in the US on November 12th at double the usual price. Before you start calling the company greedy sell-outs though, know that the machine will cost double for a reason. For every XO-1 bought by the general public, another one will be built for a developing country.

The promotion will apparently only last for two weeks though, with XO-1s arriving in time to be wrapped and put under the Christmas tree, so you better get your skates on if you want to let foreigners experience the joy of SimCity.

Will you be ordering one, or donating to the company in the future? If you could have designed a $100 laptop, what would you have put in it? Let us know in the forums!

The Digital Divide is a gap between those with technology and those without. We investigate the problems facing countries that lack the resources the west has, and look at some schemes that aim to solve those problems.

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